Category Archives: Volunteer Manager

Government strategy and funding for sport volunteers

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At the end of 2015, the UK Government published Sporting Future: A new strategy for an active nation. This strategy marked the biggest shift in Government policy on sport in more than a decade, and it actually mentions sport volunteering. It recognises that volunteering enriches the life of the volunteer and not just the participants whose sport activity is facilitated – “the double benefit of sport volunteering”. The Government wants to encourage sport and physical activity volunteering for its own sake and the strategy includes a case study on volunteering at parkrun, recognising that …..

parkrun has established a new model for community sport volunteering which puts the volunteer centre stage.

This case study makes me punch the air because it fits with what I have been getting excited about for years, see It’s an honour to volunteer for parkrun and parkrun volunteers get cold fingers and toes and a warm feeling inside.

Volunteers in high vis jackets being briefed ready to help at a parkrun

The strategy also recognises the importance of recruiting, retaining and rewarding volunteers who are representative of the entire population. It mentions a better online system for brokering sport volunteering opportunities (Consortium takes over Join In) and I am optimistic that it also means more recognition of the skills needed for volunteer management.

In response to Sporting Future, Sport England published its Volunteering Strategy in December 2016: Volunteering in an active nation. I had an opportunity to contribute ideas to this strategy and this is what I said:

My ideas on what works well for managing volunteers:

  • Focus on positives and benefits that volunteers gain by their actions; avoid talking about volunteering in terms of “giving up”, “making sacrifices” etc
  • Look after them as real people and manage them professionally
  • Simplify and standardise the processes for people to offer to volunteer – parkrun is great example
  • Value volunteer management and help people do it well
  • Celebrate the achievements of volunteers
  • Break traditional volunteer roles into chunks; encourage job-sharing

My ideas on volunteering by under-represented groups and young people

  • Nationally lots of youth organisations are focussing on mental health and there is big opportunity to improve wellbeing and raise aspirations through volunteering and/or youth social action
  • Effective work with under-represented groups needs partners on the ground who have prior relationships with the target volunteers
  • Activities need to be done with young people not done to young people
  • Best to offer a mix of activities, and to locate the volunteering in the communities as lack of transport is a barrier
  • To focus on physical activities rather than sport coaching we need people who empathise with beginners rather than coaches who want to develop elite players – need more organisers and activators
  • Empower and incentivise younger officials/club organisers. Help clubs welcome young energy and ideas that are often obstructed by an ageing, dogmatic workforce (easy to say, hard to do)

Where are we now?

  • Sport England has two funds supporting volunteering: The Opportunity Fund (targets people, aged 20+, from economically disadvantaged communities) and The Potentials Fund (targets children and young people aged 10 to 20, with a particular focus on 10-14 year-olds, who are interested in doing something to benefit their community, through social action.) Expressions of interest in the first round of these funds are now closed. See Volunteer Funding Investment Guide for more information. Sport England is making up to £26 million over 4 years available to support implementation of their Volunteering in an active nation strategy.
  • You can find a volunteering opportunity or post your volunteering opportunities on Join In
  • Sport England gives some very useful advice for volunteer managers here: Volunteering explained
  • The first Annual Report on Sporting Future was published in February this year.

The first Annual Report on Sporting Future

This 40-page report has a succinct and positive message for the future of sport volunteering. Copied below.

“Volunteering

4.32 Sporting Future takes a new approach to volunteering, recognising the positive impact it has on volunteers themselves as well as the benefits to sports and the importance of recruiting, retaining and rewarding volunteers who are representative of the entire population.

A new volunteering strategy

4.33. Sport England published its new volunteering strategy on 1 December 2016. The strategy’s objectives are to:

  • ensure better quality, meaningful volunteering experiences
  • increase the diversity of those who volunteer in sport and activity
  • increase the number of volunteers in sport and activity

Sport England is making up to £26 million over 4 years available to support implementation of this strategy.

Information about volunteering opportunities

4.34 In its volunteering strategy Sport England recognises and promotes the crucial role that digital communications can play as an enabler to increase the number and diversity of sport volunteers. As this strategy is implemented in 2017 and beyond Sport England will consider how it can best support the use of digital technology in sport volunteering.

Employee volunteering

4.35 Sport England will work with other agencies to increase the number of sport and physical activity volunteering opportunities that can be taken up by employees.

Rewards for volunteers

4.36 A joint Sport England/UK Sport review shows that national governing bodies generally engage regular volunteers from the grassroots as volunteers at major events they are hosting. UK Sport will encourage this practice to continue through its application and award process for major events funding. Support for national governing bodies on this is covered in Sport England’s volunteering strategy and both UK Sport and Sport England will be sharing best practice.”

The future

I am waiting with interest to see the outcome of the first Sport England Funding round and to see what types of projects were funded and which partners Sport England chose to work with. This will help us all understand funding priorities for subsequent rounds.

I am also eagerly awaiting developments with the new Join In Consortium under the Sport and Recreation Alliance and I really hope that we get good volunteer brokering functionality that really does “make sport and recreation volunteering more representative and accessible”. The parkrun volunteer system works, and has worked well for years. It is simple and enables participants to put their hand up for a specific job on a specific day and for local teams to manage their own volunteer roster. If you are not familiar with parkrun, you can see how it works here: volunteer at Guildford junior parkrun.

Consortium takes over Join In

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Join in, the Olympic legacy volunteering project is in new hands. I’m interested, and excited to see that the consortium led by the Sport and Recreation Alliance includes the Do-it Trust – the recently revamped volunteer matching site, Volunteering Matters, Jump and VolunteerKinetic – a web-based volunteer management system. Having worked with several of these organisations I am quite optimistic for the future of sport volunteering.

For more information see ivo article.

Two great toolkits to copy

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Here are some really useful resources that will help anyone managing volunteers for a club, an organisation or an event. They have been produced by large, reputable bodies and are freely available. So take a look, and start editing and adapting what helps you.

Adult Volunteer Management Toolkit from the DofE

The Duke of Edinburgh Award is the phenomenally successful scheme that challenges young people to learn skills, volunteer and embark on an expedition. The charity, which is celebrating it’s diamond anniversary this year, has transformed the lives of 2 million young people since it started 60 years ago.

Graphic showing 2 million young people have achieved their DofE

2016 is Diamond Challenge year https://dofediamondchallenge.org/

This toolkit is for adult volunteers who support organisations that are delivering DofE awards  – not to be confused with guidelines that are given to young people taking the award. The toolkit is mega! It has every template you could ever need, it’s downloadable and it’s just been updated. So if you are looking for good practice to copy – applications forms, interview questions, induction checklists plus guidelines to help you write your volunteer policy and handbook – it is all here. In fact it has 23 document templates that you might need for managing volunteers. It is a gem. Thank you DofE for doing such a great job.

Download the toolkit here: http://www.dofe.info/go/adultvolunteers/

Volunteer toolkit from England Athletics

Image of booklets that make up the toolkit

England Athletics Volunteer toolkit is aimed at clubs

This helpful resource separates into sections focusing on recruiting, retaining and rewarding volunteers in a club environment. It also has a useful list of volunteer role descriptions and some editable posters to advertise volunteer opportunities.

Download the toolkit here: http://www.englandathletics.org/volunteer/volunteer-toolkit

 

How do you manage a mix of volunteers?

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So you’ve worked hard recruiting volunteers for your big sports event. You’ve got local people engaged, maybe some volunteers who have helped at other big events, and you’ve got the regular bunch of helpers who know your sport inside out. How do you throw all of these people at an event and make sure it works? How do you manage a mix of volunteers with different backgrounds and experiences? This is how we did it at the World Orienteering Championships held in Scotland in  2015.

We appointed Team Leaders to manage specific functions. Some of these Leaders were sport specialists and others had specific technical skills. Each of these “Functional Team Leaders” managed a strand of the event delivery. They knew their function in detail and they were supported by the Volunteer Management Team who took care of all generic volunteer administration and communications. Here is how the Volunteer Management Team confirmed the process and responsibilities with the Functional Team Leaders:

Functional team leaders responsibilities for volunteers Functional team leaders responsibilities for volunteers2 Functional team leaders responsibilities for volunteers3

It’s a World Champs, we’ll need 100s of volunteers, and it’s 500 miles away….

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“Congratulations to the organisers and army of volunteers who helped make this happen” Dougie Vipond, The Adventure Show, BBC2 Scotland.

He was referring to the Event Team of 700 volunteers who have just delivered a Home World Orienteering Championships. A Team that was put together specially for this complex, week-long event that was broadcast live on TV. It was also held in parallel with the biggest ever Scottish 6-days making this the biggest and highest profile orienteering event ever staged in the UK.

It was a good year for Denmark, Ida Bobach World Champion at the finish of the Long Race in Glen Affric. Courtesy Liveblog http://www.woc2015.org/liveblog/long

It was a good year for Denmark, Ida Bobach World Champion at the finish of the Long Race in Glen Affric. Courtesy Liveblog

The Challenge

In May 2012, British Orienteering’s Dave Peel, recruited me into the post of WOC2015 Volunteer Manager, as a volunteer, because he could see that the team needed experience from other major sports events. My brief: Recruit a workforce to deliver the World Championship and support the Scottish 6 Days in a remote part of the UK using volunteers from outside of Scotland, and ensure that most of the orienteering volunteers can take part in most of the 6-Days.

My induction came at WOC2012 in Switzerland. Here I learnt about silent starts and sponsors, quarantines and TV demands and strict International Federation Protocols that govern a World Championships. The London Olympics came soon after WOC, and my role as a Team Leader in the Aquatic Centre was a welcome inspiration.

Recruit

We started by defining roles, identifying what could be done by people without orienteering experience, and recruiting and selecting the right people for different jobs. We had to develop our own recruitment and communication systems and I am grateful to Paul Frost, the SOA Web Developer, who helped me build a very effective volunteer recruitment website which was integrated with MailChimp for our sign-up and communication systems. I also promoted opportunities on the Volunteer Scotland website which enabled us to attract Commonwealth Games volunteers.

Of the volunteers, 120 came from outside of the sport of orienteering to do roles like sprint control marshalling, minibus driving and arena building. 580 were orienteers from all over the UK and Europe.

Volunteers came from orienteering clubs all over the UK and beyond, from local running clubs and parkrun, Volunteer Scotland, Glasgow 2014 and all of the organisations shown above

Volunteers came from orienteering clubs all over the UK and beyond, from local running clubs and parkrun, Volunteer Scotland, Glasgow 2014 and all of the organisations shown above

Prepare

Everyone needed to understand the scale of the World Champs and the orienteers needed to see how it differed from regular multi-day events.  As nothing existed, we developed our own induction and training resources including videos from footage we’d recorded at previous WOCs. We wrote comprehensive briefing instructions for control marshals to make sure they didn’t jeopardise the integrity of a sprint race. We also produced safety and social media guidelines.

My team did some clever stuff with MailChimp to produce team and key contacts lists, and to send tailored, personalized messages to each volunteer, reminding them of their team and role and including relevant inductions. These tailored communications helped us achieve a 100% turnout of volunteers on the day.

Crowds getting ready to watch the Relay in front of Darnaway Castle, Moray

Crowds getting ready to watch the Relay in front of Darnaway Castle, Moray

Support

All of the Event Team needed uniforms, photo accreditation passes and lunches – a significant undertaking. We also identified some unexpected obstacles which were extra challenges to overcome. Helping volunteers find affordable accommodation – we organised a homestay system. Overseas volunteers needed help with transport – we organised lift-sharing. Preparing non-orienteers for the vital role of sprint control guarding – we held a marshal training evening for local volunteers and it was a packed house. We worked closely with the 6-days to ensure that orienteers could have start times that were compatible with their WOC jobs. And there was one challenge that defeated us right until the end – providing helpful travel instructions to volunteers without breaking strict embargo rules of orienteering which keep map and location details strictly confidential until days before the event.

Reflections

Minority sports can benefit from volunteers that are not involved in their sport. For orienteering, volunteers such as local runners, D of E students, and increasingly “Event Volunteer Tourists” can help at big events. And there are well established routes to recruiting them – like www.joininuk.org #BigHelpOut. But it takes an investment in time and the right people to recruit and support these volunteers. When working with volunteers who are not normally part of our specific sport’s culture we mustn’t forget to really look after them – tell them what to bring, train them and give them lunch.

A little bit of legacy

We worked with the Scottish Club Development Officers to offer all the local volunteers – many members of running clubs who had been sprint control marshals – a free entry into events organised by local clubs Moravian, INVOC and BASOC following WOC2015. This was both a thank you and a chance for the volunteers to try the sport that they had seen so closely, for themselves.

Acknowledgements

To all of the individuals and clubs who worked hard in the lead up and during WOC2015:

Thank you and we hope that you were proud to be involved in the biggest and highest profile orienteering event ever held in the UK.

To Paul McGreal, Event Director who skilfully and calmly managed a very complex event – it was a pleasure working with you Paul. I believe that we benefited hugely from Paul’s leadership and his experience as ED for Celtman and World Duathlon Champs.

The heart of my volunteer management team

The heart of my volunteer management team

I’d also like to slip in a special thank you to my own team of 12, and in particular David Maliphant – Comms; Ann Haley – Data; Terry Williams – Newsletters; Craig Lowther – training.  We Skyped every fortnight in the 18 months leading up to WOC and only met for the first time in Nairn.

Postscript Focus Chief Exec's words

This post was published in part in “Orienteering Focus, The Official Voice of British Orienteering” in the Autumn/Winter 2015 Edition

All things to all people – just not at once

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As the Volunteer Manager of a big sports event, you might imagine that I get quite a few e-mails. Want to know what I do with them?

I give top priority to messages from……

  • people who are offering to volunteer – they only have me as a point of contact and they deserve to hear from us promptly
  • my own team who are developing and operating our volunteer management processes – I really want to support them and if I hold them up then everything slows down
  • those above me – the Event Directors – they have so much going on, they need their reports to jump when they say jump.

If you are none of the above, and you have contacted me, I will come back to you as soon as I can. I’m a volunteer, and I’m fitting all of this into my spare time.

Your challenge should you choose to take it

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We want you to find some volunteers to organise an event – running race marshals, that sort of thing. About 600. It will be exciting – it’s for a World Championship. By the way we are going to hold it in the north of Scotland where there is not a huge local population so you’ll need to bring volunteers in from the rest of the UK. We want the athletes and spectators to have the best experience coming to this event, so the races will be in some of the most beautiful places including one of the most remote glens in Scotland. Of course, we need to build a suitable spectator arena in each of these places, with catering, and facilities for 5000 plus big screens, commentary and TV coverage so we’ll need practical people too.

So far so good.

These marshals that you have found. We need to make sure they all go to the right places, but we cannot tell you where these places are. This is a World Orienteering Championships, it is vital that the athletes do not know where the races start, finish or what route they take. So we are closely guarding this information.

OK, systems in place, we can handle that.

The volunteers that you have recruited from within the sport, you know that they also want to take part in the spectator races on at the same time. Do what you can to organise suitable start times so they can fit in their volunteering shifts.

Getting there….

A day in the life of a Volunteer Manager

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The World Orienteering Championships start at the end of July 2015. As a minority sport, this event is being delivered by a tiny group of part-time professionals and a large “Event Team” of volunteers. I’m the Volunteer Manager and I’m a volunteer. Our event team currently stands at 400 and I’m pleased to say that all lead posts have been filled. We are still building the delivery team and expect to reach around 600 volunteers in total.

The event is now hitting the local press and volunteers are pouring into my inbox. We are appointing and organising, informing and introducing, nurturing and updating a workforce that is spread all over the UK and Europe. We have sports people specialising in planning and event organisation. And we have volunteers with experience gained at the London Olympics and Glasgow Commonwealth Games.  I’d love to be sharing what we are doing as we are doing it. But we are just too busy getting on with it. All I can do for now is share some advice about what I think is helping:

  • start early – thank goodness I started 3 years ago
  • plan for scale – we built and refined our opportunities pages, and our sign up system before the rush
  • build up healthy working relationships – I’m enjoying the strong and trusted relationships that I have with colleagues
  • build a good team around you – my collaborative and good-humoured team are one of the highlights of this event for me. We Skype’s fortnightly and keep in close touch
  • talk to people – you can feel like a real human being, achieve good things, and avoid painful misunderstandings by speaking sometimes instead of e-mailing

A typical day in the life of an Event Volunteer Manager starts at 7, ends at 11, includes a run and far too much time at a computer. It has laughs and lists of lists and occasional desk-thumping frustrations. Overall it is pretty damn good. I haven’t got time to write a day in the life. When it is all over I’ll write about how we did it. Let’s get there first!

Where can you look for volunteers?

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Positive cycleVolunteers and volunteering in sport: Some ideas, advice and agencies that can help you.

An extract of my presentation to a recent British Orienteering Conference.

 

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it”

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said, George Bernard Shaw, and I agree.

Ever wanted to put your hand up but hesitated in the face of negativity? Ever watched while a single doom-monger, with a well-timed outburst, puts off a whole crowd who are working on a good idea?

You may have just encountered a pessimist. Pessimists will often sound like this: He tried whatever you are suggesting once (just once, mind!) and it didn’t work. She did something similar to what you are suggesting and it didn’t work. They know someone who tried something ……..

What to do? Here’s a simple 3-point plan:

Separate
Dismiss
Gather strength in numbers

Separate yourself from these negative people. You will never change them. They may be people who have always had trouble seeing the positive or they have had a past experience that has put them off.

Dismiss their discouraging remarks for what they are – usually an isolated or historical example not relevant to the plans in progress.

Gather strength in numbers if there are more of you with positive ideas on what CAN be done, stick together. Support each other.

What ever happens, don’t let a lone negative voice disrupt the way of progress and good ideas. If all else fails, quote George Bernard Shaw at them!

And see for here for more inspiration